


Writing is a Walk in the Park

by dearlyqueer



Category: Wynonna Earp (TV)
Genre: AU, F/F
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-25
Updated: 2018-02-01
Packaged: 2019-03-09 04:45:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13473969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dearlyqueer/pseuds/dearlyqueer
Summary: Waverly is an author working on her next book when writer's block strikes. After seeing Nicole at the park, she has a new muse. But will she find her again?





	1. Musings

Waverly sits among the chaos. She did plan it this way though. Alone on her bench, she's surrounded by flurries of activity. She can see and hear everything going on around her. The little boy arguing with his mother about getting ice cream, two nervous boys talking about how they’re going to ask girls to prom, the cyclists weaving through the walkers. She’s in the busiest section of Central Park in New York City and yet nothing sparks. No human interaction she's witnessed, or even any random bouts of swearing have triggered anything. Waverly sits in the middle of the chaos searching for any trace of inspiration and finding none.

This had never happened to her before. She’d always heard people complain about writer’s block but had considered it either a myth, or herself immune. Whatever the case is, it’s no longer true. Waverly Earp, author of the New York Times bestseller Back to the Homestead, has writer’s block. Her nose wrinkles with disdain just thinking of the term.

By all accounts, she’s lucky. At only 22, she’s riding the success of her first published novel, but now she owes a sequel. Now the characters, the people she created belong not just to her but to a larger world. And now she must do right by not only those characters, but also by their audience. Until her novel became a bestseller, Waverly didn’t realize the personal impact it could have on strangers’ lives. Of course, she has a library of her own favorites, books that by all accounts changed the way she viewed the world. But her novel has that same level of impact on others? That’s crazy.

Waverly had worked harder than anyone else at everything she’d ever done, yearning for small pieces of recognition from her mother until she left, from her father until his death, and now from her sister who had, for all intents and purposes, largely disappeared. Unaccustomed to the weight of lofty expectations, she’s finally buckling under the pressure, which led her to close her laptop in frustration, grab a notebook and walk the streets of New York City to Central Park. She staked a claim to this bench in the middle of the chaos, flipped her notebook and her senses open, and searched for inspiration.

All she’s found is frustration. As much as she tries to put it out of her mind, her approaching deadline keeps creeping back in, adding little layers of panic. She’d prepared. She has the story all mapped out, but she’s hit a wall. Something’s missing. The organic flow of character action she had before is missing.

Waverly looks down at her notebook and hovers her pen over the first line of a blank page. Just write something. She sets her pen on the line. Presses it down. A trace of ink. 

“Excuse me. Do you mind if I sit?”

She was about to finally write and now this?!

Waverly looks up sharply, her frustration bubbling up and settling with a twitch of her nose. But when she sees her, the frustration slips to away, replaced by a strange sensation of peace. 

Waverly smiles.

“Not at all.”

The redhead smiles back and sits at the other end of the bench, leaving a comfortable distance between them. The woman pulls a book from her bag, flips it open, and immediately seems immune to their chaotic surroundings.

Waverly observes her as stealthily as possible. Stealing quick glances here and there. There’s something about this woman. Waverly can feel it. Something about the gentleness of her eyes, the small, content smile that settles on her lips. The woman looks up to meet Waverly’s gaze and it’s there! The spark Waverly’s been searching for.

Waverly blushes at being caught and looks back down to her notebook. As she stares at the blank page with the little ink smudge an idea starts forming. She follows it in her mind and is awestruck by where it leads. Abruptly, she closes her notebook, hoists her bag onto her shoulder, and walks away, ignorant of the disappointed gaze of the redhead watching her go.

As soon as Waverly makes it home to her studio apartment, she sits at her desk, opens her laptop, and starts typing. The words pass from brain to fingertips fluidly, filling blank pages rapidly.

There was indeed a hole in the story. A person-shaped hole. Apparently, a redheaded Sheriff’s Deputy is exactly what was missing. It’s hours later when Waverly finally closes her laptop, flexing her fingers, that she realizes she left her muse behind without so much as a word, a glance, or a way to find her again. A strange feeling settles in Waverly’s stomach. She knows, somehow, that this woman is important, in a way other than a simple jumping off point for a character. Letting out a sigh, she’s left with an improbable hope that she will meet this woman again.


	2. Searching For Peace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nicole's POV of her first encounter with Waverly. After a rough shift, Nicole heads to Central Park looking for peace. Luckily, she finds Waverly.

Nicole isn’t sure she can take the tossing and turning anymore. She was supposed to get home from the last in a long string of night shifts and sleep herself back into a normally functioning human being. Instead, scenes of a broken body flash across her eyelids. It’d been a rough shift. Always was when she’s assigned to assist the detectives at a homicide scene.

She can’t just stay here. Sleep is obviously too elusive at the moment.

Nicole drags herself out of bed and pulls open her blackout curtains, wincing at the midday light. Once her eyes adjust, she looks down to the street, watching herds of people walk the sidewalks. That’s what she needs. To be surrounded by life.

Nicole pulls on the first jeans and flannel she can find, steps into and laces her combat boots, then grabs the most worn out book she has on her bookshelf.

Outside her apartment, Nicole joins the crowd. As she walks among the living, she feels minutely better, but it’s not quite the remedy she was hoping for. She finds herself in Central Park and hopes that the mundanity of the human chaos surrounding her will quiet her mind. She feels the exhaustion urge her to find somewhere to sit. The first bench she comes across is occupied, as is the second, and by the time she gets to the third, she no longer cares.

It’s only the politeness her parents had been sure to ingrain within her as a child that forces words from her mouth without the consent of her conscious mind.

“Excuse me. Do you mind if I sit?”

Truth be told, Nicole could not care less about whether this woman minds. But as Nicole watches the woman’s nose twitch in irritation, a detail that likely would have escaped anyone who wasn’t trained to constantly be looking for people’s tells, she feels a small trace of guilt build within her as she realizes the woman had just poised her pen to start filling a blank page.

Then, the woman raises her gaze to meet Nicole’s and she finally feels it. The peace she has been searching since she first started tossing and turning in bed.

The woman smiles.

“Not at all.”

Nicole can’t help but smile back. She sits as far away as the bench will allow, not wanting to encroach too much the woman’s space. She pulls her book from her bag, opens it to a random page, and allows the familiar words to steal her away.

It’s several minutes later when she feels a distraction tugging her attention from the book. She looks up to see the woman staring at her. Of course, she quickly looks back down to her notebook right as Nicole meets her gaze. Nicole’s focus, however, stays on the woman. She’s captivated by the look of concentration the woman now carries as she stares down at her notebook, her head tilted slightly to the side. Nicole can practically see the gears turning in this woman’s head.

Nicole realizes how beautiful the woman really is as she watches her put together whatever puzzle she’s mentally working on.

Without warning, the woman closes her notebook, rises, and walks off while slinging her backpack over her shoulder.

Nicole feels the disappointment rise within her. She should have talked to the woman. She fights off the strange desire to run after the woman until she disappears from sight.

Nicole returns her attention to her book and enjoys another hour of peace with the words before the need for sleep sends her back to her apartment.

Nicole again draws the blackout curtains shut and settles herself in bed. She closes her eyes and feels the peace she’d managed drain from her mind.

The images of the broken body seep back in, sending Nicole tossing and turning once again. But then, her mind drags up the image of the woman from the park, of that curious way she tilted her head. Finally, Nicole drifts to sleep, no doubt to dream of meeting this woman again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey friends! I settled down to write the next chapter of Waverly's side of things and instead Nicole's half of the meeting came to mind, so this story will apparently be shifting POVs.
> 
> Also, I greatly appreciate all the comments and kudos on the previous chapter. They're excellent motivators.
> 
> Take care of yourself.
> 
> You can find me on twitter as @christina_farbs if you want to for whatever reason :)


	3. Faith, Trust, Pixie Dust

It had been a week. An entire week since Waverly had encountered the woman she has now begrudgingly accepted to be her muse. Throughout the week, Waverly had written more than she’s been capable of in the past month. Her brain has turned into a constant story mine centered around the gentle-eyed redhead from the park. Waverly has made decent progress on _The Homestead_ ’s yet unnamed sequel, sure, but she’s also found herself significantly distracted by short stories and little scenes of the woman going about her daily life.

At this point, Waverly ponders if it could be considered creepy. She has a notebook that might as well be specifically dedicated to imaginings of the redhead. Waverly’s written about her as an astronomer explaining the constellations to interested children, playing a pick up game of basketball, going on a first date, which admittedly churned Waverly’s stomach in an odd sort of way.

With the returned inspiration, Waverly’s dedicated herself entirely to writing, spending most of her time locked away in her studio apartment working on her book with one notable exception. Every day at 2 PM Waverly walks to Central Park and reclaims the bench where she had met the woman. She spends a few hours sitting and writing all her imaginings in her notebook, while constantly looking up, hoping to catch another glimpse of the woman.

So now, Waverly sits on the bench in Central Park doing exactly that. She’s been here nearly an hour already when a flash of red appears in her periphery. Filled with hope and excitement, Waverly chases the flash with her gaze, only to be disappointed. Before her is a beautiful redheaded woman, but not the _right_ one.

Waverly turns back to her writing, with frustration that only grows as she tries to determine what name she’ll give the woman for the story of the day. She’s gone through a different name each story, but nothing really fits. The closest she’s come is for the character in her book, the tough, perceptive, and compassionate Deputy Sheriff Kat Barrell. That one doesn’t feel as off-putting since the character is a derivative and it’s own person separate from the woman Waverly had met. It seems far more acceptable than Ashley, the name she assigns to the woman as she writes about her life as an embedded photojournalist in Afghanistan.

I should have at least asked her name, Waverly thinks. Useless.

An hour later, Waverly closes her notebook, taking one last look around her section of the park. She sighs. Not this time. Maybe tomorrow.  
_____________________________________________________________________________________

“Take!” Nicole yells down to Dolls. He responds immediately, removing the extra slack in the rope. Nicole lets her grip relax on the rock and sits back in the harness, now being held securely over a hundred feet in the air by nothing more than Dolls and a little rope.

She gives herself a minute to take in the view that she had earned. She’s surrounded by bright red trees and can see a good portion of the river off in the distance. It’s peaceful, just her on the top of the world, away from all the madness and all the crazy of the people who inhabit it.

Nicole focuses back on the task at hand and sets to work securing herself to the anchors at the top of the route. She did the climb last, so it’s her job to clean it - to get all of their gear back on the way down.

As she sets up her rappel, her mind wanders again to the woman from the park, a constant distraction over the course of this climbing trip, and daily life in general. Nicole wonders if their paths will ever cross again. How strange it is to be so captivated by a woman she had just barely spoken to.

Nicole begins lowering herself to the ground, stopping at each bolt to collect the quickdraws - the pieces she had clipped the rope in to on her way up to catch her when she fell. When she hits the ground, Dolls walks over and helps undo the knot while Nicole organizes the gear.

They have formed a great partnership after taking up climbing together while in the police academy. All the trainees had gone to a climbing gym together and the two found themselves engaged in friendly competition for the night which ended with them both hooked on the sport. That was the beginning of their friendship and a great partnership both on the rock and on the force.

“Nice climb.” He says in his simple way.

“It was a fun one.”

“What happened at the fifth bolt? You looked steady on it ’til the fall.” It had been a pretty big fall when Nicole was trying to clip the fifth bolt with the extra slack in the rope needed to do so. Her mind, normally calm and focused while climbing had been…

“Just distracted.”

“Really?” 

Nicole shrugs. Dolls quirks his eyebrow, skeptical. Ever the conversationalist, he lets it go with nothing more.

On the hike out, Nicole finds herself continuously distracted by thoughts of the woman and wondering what she’s up to. How could she possibly find her again?

When she and Dolls arrive back at their camp Nicole decides to get some reading in while Dolls builds the fire and fixes dinner. She pulls a new book from her bag, but with clumsy and tired hands it catches on the opening of the bag and falls to the ground, an overly familiar image flashing amongst the pages and Nicole watches it fall.

Wondering if she had hallucinated, Nicole picks up the book, _The Homestead_ , and looks at the author’s bio inside the back cover. Staring back at her from the image is the woman from the park.  
“Waverly Earp,” Nicole mutters in awe.

“What’s that, Haught?” Dolls asks.

“Nothing.” 

As she reads the bio she beams. She’d just stumbled across her mystery woman. So maybe she does stand a chance of finding her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, anyone interested in a Rock Climbing A/U? I am a rock climbing youth coach so as I was writing this chapter the climbing trip came up by accident but I do see a fun opportunity :)


	4. Distractions

Police officer Nicole Haught sits at a desk in the station decidedly doing nothing resembling police work. She occasionally takes bites out of her sandwich but finds herself largely distracted from the well-earned lunch she’d spent the entire first half of her shift craving by the contents of her computer screen.

_Waverly Earp, author of The Homestead resides in New York City where she is hard at work on the sequel of her debut novel._

There’s frustratingly little information about the woman on her own website in Nicole’s opinion. Instead, it’s largely dedicated to expanding on the world of _The Homestead_ , about the history of the Revenants, or rather the demons the heroine battles, and about the fictional family history that led to the whole curse thing. Which, of course, Nicole finds very interesting as she did enjoy the book, but she really would prefer more insight on the author herself at the moment.

Nicole clicks on the _Appearances_ tab on the website, grimacing as the page slowly loads. She had taken a bite of her sandwich only to find that the kid who made it got it wrong. She opens up the sandwich and pulls all traces of pickles from it with rather childish disdain. 

When Nicole returns her attention to the computer screen it has finally loaded. Nicole is quickly left with a mixture of disappointment and relief. Waverly Earp has no up-coming scheduled appearances, allowing Nicole to continue putting off her misgivings over essentially stalking the woman.

“Why am I doing this?” Nicole ponders aloud, quickly looking around with wide eyes. No one seems to have heard her.

“Haught!” Sargent Nedley calls. Nicole hastily closes her browser, feeling caught somehow. _Definitely could be considered stalking_.

“Sir?” she responds, trying to bury her guilt. Nedley eyes her skeptically.

“Detectives Shapiro and Holliday need you for a case. Head over.”

“Yes, sir!” Nicole sweeps her trash from the desk and quickly makes her way to the detectives’ bullpen, excitement thrumming through her at the opportunity to prove herself.

Detective Shapiro immediately waves her over when she becomes visible in the doorway.

“Haught, you’re gonna be with us for a while.”

Detective Eliza Shapiro is just about as by the book as a detective can get. Her suit fitted, paperwork always flawless, no stone left unturned, she’s become the detective everyone scrambles to get in good with. She makes a stark contrast to his partner, Detective “Doc” John Henry Holliday, nicknamed for his quick thinking in the field treating a bullet wound to save his partners life back when they were still just patrol officers, or at least that’s the story passed down to every new officer that encounters the pair. 

Doc is much more comfortable toeing the line than his partner is, working predominantly on instinct more than anything, and donning jeans, boots, and a cowboy hat to match his old west style mustache. They make a surprisingly strong partnership now.

Nicole sits across from Eliza, while Doc wheels himself over to sit beside her. Five minutes into the twenty-minute briefing, Nicole can see exactly where this is heading. When the detectives finally stop flipping through folders to show her more and more of the case and look up to her for a response, she’s forcing her posture to remain relaxed.

“You need me undercover.” They, an action Nicole mirrors.

“When?”

“Tonight,” Eliza speaks firmly, no-nonsense.

“Okay. How long?” This time Doc responds, with more kindness as he makes eye contact with Nicole in an attempt to put her at ease.

“There are numerous possibilities. It could take a mere few days, however, there is the potential it could last months. Cases such as these can be rather fickle creatures, rather difficult to predict that is.”

“Do I have time to make a few phone calls?”

“Of course,” Doc responds before Eliza can object.

“Excuse me.” Nicole leaves the bullpen and heads straight for the women’s locker room where she changes mechanically from her uniform into her street clothes.

She sits on the bench in front her locker, phone in hand and releases the tension that’s been creeping into her body in deep breaths.

It won’t be her first time undercover, but the few times before only involved her battling discomfort and self-consciousness on a street corner wearing minimal clothing and with plenty of her fellow officers hidden away to have her back. This would be different. Sure she’d be checking in with Doc and Eliza every few days, but she’d be largely on her own.

She’s up for it. _Of course_ , she is. Nicole’s always been determined to protect and serve no matter the personal cost, but fear is a normal, human reaction. Instead of giving in to it, Nicole chooses courage, because that’s just who she is. That’s why she spends her days wearing a bulletproof vest in preparation for the very real possibility that someone would shoot at her or try to kill her.

Nicole swipes open her phone, prepared to call… who? With a self-deprecating chuckle, Nicole realizes that she no longer has anyone to call. She hasn’t heard from her parent in years. Her fling of a marriage had ended in divorce and though they parted on amicable terms, Shae hardly needs to be notified of Nicole’s potential absence should she call. It would be business as usual for the two of them. Dolls, along with the rest of her fellow officers would figure it out on their own or through the department.

A knock echoes through the deserted locker room.

“Haught! You decent?” Sargent Nedley’s voice carries through the thick door.

“Yes, sir,” Nicole responds, standing. Nedley enters, appearing sufficiently out of his element.

“This is the women’s locker room, sir.” Nicole musters a teasing grin, which she knows Nedley must see straight through. He’s always been good at reading her.

“It is.” He nods awkwardly. “I’ll take good care of that cat of yours while you’re gone.”

“She doesn’t really like men.” Nicole smiles truly now.

“Well, who does?”

“Thank you, Sarge.”

“You come back in one piece. Got it, Haught?”

“Yes, sir.”

Nedley nods and looks around the room once more before turning and leaving.

Nicole stashes her phone in her locker along with her keys and personal belongings. Her gaze lingers longingly on her vest hanging in the locker. She takes a deep breath and prepares to leave every piece of her comfort zone behind her.

Radiating confidence she will soon force herself to feel, Nicole returns to Doc and Dolls, ready to become someone else. To protect and serve. Finding Waverly Earp would just have to wait. It’s not like she has any leads anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long. The good news is I've come up with an outline for this so I actually know what I'm writing toward.  
> So, I'll see you sooner with the next chapter :) 
> 
> And that rock climbing AU I mentioned last chapter has been outlined as well so there's more to come from me!
> 
> Next chapter, we'll get back to Waverly :)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey friends! Thanks for reading. My hope is that the chapters will get longer as I get the hang of this and a feel for this new story. I'd love it if you could leave me some feedback. I'm new to fanfic but wanted to give it a try. I'm challenging myself to write every day, so if you have any prompts you would like me to give a try, you can find me on twitter as @christina_farbs or on Tumblr as @christina-farbs :)


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